Fantasy books and fundamentalism

Libby Anne's post on fantasy books and fundamentalism today got me thinking. Responding to a reader question about why fundamentalists love Narnia and Lord of the Rings, but hate Harry Potter, she argues that there really is no internally consistent reason for it.

I've been wondering about this too. There was a fundie family at my parents' church growing up who had the same restrictions--Harry Potter evil, LOTR good. I enjoyed bringing my HP to church to torment them.

Just sitting here pondering, I wonder if it could have something to do with semantics and gender--"witch" vs. "wizard" definitely have different connotations. [Note: I'm leaving out more contemporary deconstructions of magic, as in SF/F mid-century and all its descendants.]

"Witches", in the common understanding, are evil. They worship the devil in medieval Christian lore, and more than 40,000 people (men and women) were executed as witches between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. (Incidentally, I wonder how modern-day fundamentalists view these events.) In popular culture, witches are evil too. The Wicked Witch of the West, Baba Yaga, Morgan le Fay; witches in fairy stories like Hansel and Gretl and Rapunzel, in Disney movies like The Little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. My mom didn't become a Christian until she was in her teens, but she is afraid of witches and dark magic. She told me as a kid that I should stay away from Ouija boards and Wicca because they were filled with forces of evil, and I was afraid to watch Buffy when it was on TV. Note how most of these examples associate witches with femininity.

"Wizards", on the other hand, have a completely different connotation in popular culture. They are wise old men, gifted in alchemy, healing, and lore, like Nicolas Flamel, Agrippa, and Paracelsus. There is Merlin, generally viewed as a hero of the King Arthur stories, and definitely a Good Guy in Disney's A Sword in the Stone. There's Prospero, a complicated protagonist but a protagonist nonetheless. The Wizard of Oz, again, not evil, just weak. Of course there's some bad ones, like Aleister Crowley, but in general wizarding is something you learn to do, a tool you can use for good or evil, rather than something you are. And, the word "wizard" is uniquely used for men.

And then we have the fantasy stories we're talking about here. The only witch in LOTR is the Witch-King of Angmar, the king of the Nazgul (whose masculinity, interestingly, has to be specified with the "-king" modifier). The White Witch and the Emerald Witch in Narnia, both female, are evil. On the other hand, Coriakin and other (male) wizards like Ramandu in Narnia are Good Guys (although Lewis takes pains only to refer to them as "magicians"). Andrew Ketterley, the Magician of The Magician's Nephew, is a villain, although not the major one. LOTR's wizards Gandalf and Radagast the Brown are, of course, heroes, and Saruman was a good wizard until he was led astray. Again we have witches/women=bad, wizards/men=good (mostly).

Now let us turn to Harry Potter. In Harry Potter, "witch" and "wizard" are just synonyms for "female magical person" and "male magical person". Both witches and wizards can be good or evil or just complicatedly human, and it has nothing to do with their gender. The wizarding world is pretty good on gender equality as well. The workforce, Hogwarts' students and staff, the Order of the Phoenix and Dumbledore's Army--all seem pretty evenly split between men and women. We have strong herione witches and strong hero wizards, and (one?) evil witch and a bunch of evil wizards. In other words, Harry Potter upends the traditional conception of magic--that is, power--as evil when wielded by women and good when wielded by men. And I can totally understand why fundies would be scared of that.